Residents of the Palestinian neighborhood, Jabal al-Mukaber, protested on March 20 the proposed demolition of their homes to make way for an expansion of a highway that would connect Israeli settler neighborhoods / credit: Jessica Buxbaum
Correction: The majority of homes to be razed were built after 1967. A previous version of this article stated otherwise.
EAST JERUSALEM—For the fifth week in a row, residents of Jabal al-Mukaber, a Palestinian neighborhood in Occupied East Jerusalem, demonstrated outside city hall against a municipal plan to demolish their homes.
Banging drums, blaring fog horns and blowing whistles, protesters demanded on March 20 that the municipality freeze 62 home demolition orders. Residents received these notices in January as part of a plan to expand the American Road, a highway cutting through Jabal al-Mukaber and largely viewed as a bypass serving illegal Israeli settlements throughout Jerusalem.
“This is a political target by the municipality to push the residents of Jabal al-Mukaber to take their stuff and live outside of Jerusalem,” said Mohamed Nas, who received a demolition order.
A map depicting the American Road as well as its proposed expansion / credit: The Middle East Eye
East Jerusalem’s ‘Urban Renewal’ Plan
The American Road was first proposed in 1996. It is named after a much narrower road U.S. contractors had abandoned midway through construction because the Six-Day War had begun in 1967. By the 2019, plans were underway to turn the rural road into an urban highway. The latest $250 million construction began in 2020.
The American Road recently was widened by 52 feet. But now plans are underway to expand the highway by another 105 feet, where the 62 houses slated for demolition are located.
An estimated 800 housing units also are being threatened with demolition to develop both sides of the highway, mostly for commercial and office use.
Sari Kronish, an architect with Israeli planning rights organization Bimkom, explained the municipality is hoping to turn the area around the American Road into an urban center. But without an adequate proportion reserved for residential use, the municipality’s urban renewal scheme fails in addressing the neighborhood’s main issue—a lack of housing.
“Equitable housing solutions are what drive the market,” Kronish said. “If we compare it to other places in the country, you have a minimum of 50 percent housing here.”
According to Kronish, residential building rights are included in this development plan, but do not allow for legalizing existing homes. Therefore, the houses in Jabal al-Mukaber will need to be razed and rebuilt into 8-floor units to meet the municipality’s new standards.
While only 62 homes in Jabal al-Mukaber have received official demolition orders, residents say municipal building plans suggest a total of 862 homes on about 94 acres are at risk of demolition because of the highway’s outlined development and proposed commercial center.
“Projects of urban renewal and evacuation and construction are being led, in cooperation and in dialogue with the residents,” said a municipality spokesperson, referencing reaching a joint compromise with the Bashir family in Jabal al-Mukaber.
However, the municipality did not respond when asked to elaborate on this agreement. Nas said any proposed settlements in Jabal al-Mukaber are false.
Israeli forces try to disperse Palestinian residents as a Palestinian building, located in Zif village, is demolished by Israel allegedly for being “unlicensed,” in Hebron, West Bank on February 15 / credit: Mamoun Wazwaz / Anadolu Agency
Denying the Right to Build
In a statement to Toward Freedom, the municipality said they will not permit illegal construction in the city. The majority of homes in Jabal al-Mukaber, and throughout East Jerusalem, lack building permits.
According to Jerusalem municipality data obtained by settlement watchdog group, Peace Now, only 16 percent of Jerusalem’s Palestinian neighborhoods received building permits from 1991 to 2018, compared to 38 percent of construction permits approved for Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem. The extreme difficulty Palestinians experience in getting construction permits forces many to build without the necessary approvals or live in homes deemed illegal.
Not only do Palestinians face a labyrinth of bureaucratic procedures when building, but a lack of available land as well. Palestinians in East Jerusalem can only build on 17 percent of the land, while 35 percent is labeled as green spaces or conservation areas. In Jabal al-Mukaber, nearly 70 percent of the land is designated as “open space.”
Mohammad Mashal, 71, received his first demolition notice in 1994. He’s paid 200,000 shekels, or $62,000, in fines over nearly three decades. Mashal consistently applied for a permit, but was always rejected. Just last month, he received another demolition order as part of the 62 cases slated for demolition.
Ahmad Akmasri, 25, explained his father built their home before 1967 and decided to extend it in 2006. In 2010, the family started applying for a permit. But, until now, no building rights have been issued.
“We’re talking about 12 years in which we paid up to 100,000 shekels [$31,000] in fees, applications for the engineers, lawyers, all of what you can imagine, and it’s still not yet done,” Akmasri said.
Akmasri’s family is also embroiled in a separate building obstacle due to the Kaminitz Law. Passed by the Israeli parliament in 2017, it allows officials unlimited power in cracking down on unauthorized building, specifically in granting extensions on demolition orders. In addition to the 62 demolition cases in Jabal al-Mukaber, 70 other cases are related to the Kaminitz Law, including Akmasri’s family. With this new legislation, the family faces yet another fine after being unable to secure an extension in 2020 over administrative issues spurred by the coronavirus pandemic.
Raed Bashir, the lawyer representing the neighborhood, submitted repeated objections to the municipal court against the demolition orders—all of which were rejected. But the movement remains steadfast as Bashir plans to submit next month an objection to Israel’s Supreme Court.
Mousa Jumah, 61, received a demolition notice about a decade ago.
“We have no rest in our life,” he said, describing a tense environment not unlike the atmosphere of the March 20 protest. “We are under pressure, and pressure leads to explosion.”
Amid the beating of drums and marching demonstrators inching closer and closer to barricaded city hall doors, Jumah captured the sentiment under the loud chanting: A sense of perpetual uncertainty.
“We have no future,” Jumah said. “We are wasted in this world.”
Jessica Buxbaum is a Jerusalem-based freelance journalist reporting on Palestine and the Israeli occupation. You can follow her on Twitter at @jess_buxbaum.
The entrance to the Khan al-Ahmar school in the West Bank, which reads “Khan al-Ahmar School” in Arabic / credit: Ahmad Al-Bazz
KHAN AL-AHMAR, West Bank—More than 70 years after being expelled from the Naqab Desert, Bedouins in the occupied West Bank may become refugees once again.
This month, Israel’s Supreme Court gave the government until April 2 to respond to pro-settler Israeli NGO Regavim’s request to demolish the Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar. In 2018, the High Court green-lighted Khan al-Ahmar’s destruction, but the government has yet to formulate a plan for carrying out the ruling.
More than half of the village’s approximately 280 residents are children attending Khan al-Ahmar’s primary school, which could soon turn to rubble if the village is razed.
Khan al-Ahmar’s students aren’t the only Palestinian children whose academic futures are under threat, however. According to the Arab Campaign for Education for All, 58 Palestinian schools serving 6,550 children, including Khan al-Ahmar’s, are currently at risk of demolition.
“When our students face the challenges of occupation, it’s not only the damage of the schools, it’s not only the arrests of teachers and students, but the psychosocial part, which reflects in the [students’] attitudes and well-being,” Sadiq Al-Khadour, spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority’s Education Ministry, told Toward Freedom.
The Israeli Supreme Court has approved the demolition of the village of Khan al-Ahmar in the West Bank / credit: Ahmad Al-Bazz
Israel Undermining Palestinian Education
Students face a myriad of obstacles while attempting to earn an education in Palestine. In addition to school demolitions, students experience detention or arrests by the Israeli army, military raids into their school, delays in their commutes due to checkpoints, and violence from Israeli settlers and soldiers on their way to school. According to the UN, students in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem experienced a more than 150-percent increase in education-related violations from 2021 to 2022.
Palestinian schools in East Jerusalem have had their licenses revoked for refusing to teach the Israeli narrative in their curriculum, while those who comply have received a boost in funding. According to the Education Ministry, Jerusalem schools are also the most overcrowded in Palestine, with an average of more than 37 students packed into a classroom. The average student-to-teacher ratio in Palestine is 24-1.
In the besieged Gaza Strip, Israeli missiles have destroyed academic institutions and killed teachers and students.
“This undermines students’ and teachers’ right to access the appropriate educational process,” said Tamam Mohsen, advocacy officer at Al Mezan Center for Human Rights. Mohsen’s organization, which focuses on Gaza, explained that more than 571 educational facilities were wiped out by Israeli bombs from 2008 to 2021.
A teacher and students in a classroom at the Khan al-Ahmar school in the West Bank / credit: Ahmad Al-Bazz
A School Born Out of Necessity
With April’s court deadline fast approaching, the Khan al-Ahmar school and the surrounding community are on edge.
“We’ve heard the news and this has put students in an unstable mood,” said Isra Zahran, who teaches mathematics to students from 7th to 10th grades. Zahran explained constant visits from NGOs and the press have distracted students.
Built in 2009, the school has become essential for Khan al-Ahmar’s children.
Headmistress Halima Zahaike explained that before the school’s establishment, children would take the arduous journey to Jericho for school while some—especially girls—would merely forgo their education.
“Today, girls who are 22 years old or more don’t even know how to write their name because they used to stay home with no education,” Zahaike said. With this clear need, the idea for a school in the heart of Khan al-Ahmar was born.
Like the majority of Palestinian villages in the Israeli-military-controlled Area C of the West Bank, Khan al-Ahmar doesn’t have a zoning plan. Therefore, any construction is deemed illegal. In order to circumvent Israeli military regulations, the school was built as a temporary structure using tires, clay, and mud. The project was built with the support of Italian non-profit Vento di Terra and the European Union.
Yet, even during the school’s construction, classrooms were razed by Israeli authorities.
A Palestinian Education ministry official walks down tires that make up part of the structure of the compound for the Khan al-Ahmar school in the West Bank / credit: Ahmad Al-Bazz
‘I Will Keep Studying Atop Rubble’
With demolition looming, Khan al-Ahmar’s students are losing their will to learn.
“Many of the students say, ‘Our school will be demolished and we’ll have to go to Jericho. I know that I can’t go to Jericho, so let’s skip,’” Zahran said. “We try to encourage them, but there’s this feeling of not being motivated because they ask themselves ‘what I’m going to do after [the demolition].’”
With these barriers to education, 25 percent of Palestinian boys drop out of school by age 15. Despite this figure, the youth literacy rate is over 99 percent in Palestine.
The feeling of resilience is palpable among Palestinian students. While Zahran appears apprehensive, past school demolitions prove Palestinians’ determination to learn.
In November, Israeli forces demolished Isfey Al-Fawqa elementary school in Masafer Yatta, a collective of rural hamlets in the southern West Bank. Days later, students were studying in tents erected above the crushed cement.
The Ministry of Education provided the tents to Masafer Yatta’s students and said they will do the same for Khan al-Ahmar if dismantled.
“If you ask any one of them, they will say, ‘We will never leave our school,’” Zahaike said of her students. “They say, ‘If it gets demolished, I will keep studying atop the rubble.’”
Jessica Buxbaum is a Jerusalem-based freelance journalist reporting on Palestine and the Israeli occupation. You can follow her on Twitter at @jess_buxbaum.
Firefighters in Gaza tackled in 2014 a fire caused by an Israeli missile strike on an United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East storehouse / credit: Ashraf Amra / APA images
Kamel Arafa’s family is in constant fear that something bad could happen to him. Relatives of the firefighter from the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza City have therefore decided to try to stay in constant touch with him during emergencies.
It doesn’t quite suit Arafa, 38, even if he appreciates the concern.
“It is better not to call. I’ve asked my family to calm down. They just can’t. They are right as well. What we go through is brutal.”
The father of four has been an emergency responder for 15 years. He joined rescue crews during all recent major Israeli aggressions against Gaza, starting in 2008.
“Every time I hear my phone ringing during escalations, I instantly understand it is work with a new emergency and probably more casualties,” he told The Electronic Intifada.
He answers such calls with mixed feelings.
“We throw ourselves into dangerous situations to rescue people from death but we know we might be dead ourselves at any moment.”
During Israeli offensives, Arafa works from early morning until late night to rescue people and their belongings, especially those buried under rubble. He sometimes does not return to his house for five or more consecutive nights.
“Once we get a chance to rest before heading to a new task, we nap anywhere. Anywhere. On any piece of cloth, on the sidewalk, in the car.”
Despite all the challenges, he said, they will continue to work. No matter the danger, every first responder will only work harder when they hear people crying for help from under rubble, he said.
2014 Trauma
During challenging times, Arafa wants to be next to his children, aged between 6 and 12, and wife to reassure them. “I sometimes hug them so hard before leaving home, a goodbye hug as if I might not return.”
First responders usually carry traumatic memories around with them. Arafa has his share.
The 2014 massacre which Israel carried out in the Shujaiya neighborhood of Gaza City proved particularly harrowing.
“In 2014, we were able to enter Shujaiya after Israel declared a humanitarian truce. The truce was violated immediately by the Israeli forces. The whole scene was awful. Many bodies were strewn on the ground. Some were fully burnt. There were also the bodies of animals.”
During the same assault, he still vividly remembers the aftermath of the Wahdan family massacre in the northern Gaza town Beit Hanoun. Israeli soldiers had kept the family inside and used their home as a military base.
Twelve people died there, and Arafa vividly remembers specifically how the women’s bodies were burnt.
“I cannot forget at all. It was horrifying,” he told The Electronic Intifada.
“We saw women besides their children, all dead under the rubble. I sometimes think of their last moments, what they were thinking of, and how they felt. It is a bad ending.”
Like Arafa, Mohammad Abu Shaqfa worked throughout all Israel’s wars on the Gaza Strip. He remembers them all simply as bloody conflicts filled with people in need of his help, except for 2014, when it got more personal, and he lost two of his closest colleagues in front of his eyes.
Abu Shaqfa, 34, and five of his colleagues had been called to the Shujaiya neighborhood, and thought at first that the shelling had stopped.
“All of a sudden, a series of heavy explosive tank shells were fired directly at us. Our colleagues Rami Thaher and Ahed Dahduh were killed in front of my eyes,” said Abu Shaqfa.
He took a small pause to collect himself before he continued.
“It was a shock. I was in disbelief,” Abu Shaqfa told The Electronic Intifada. “It was a huge loss for me.”
No Protection
For Abu Shaqfa, the job is just that, a job.
“I have no difficulty rescuing people I don’t know.”
But it was different with his colleagues. “It was much harder,” he said. “We were six on that mission. Only four came back.”
He had done his best to deal with the situation and continue working. But he concedes that “I did not give myself enough time” to process what he had just seen.
There were other people to rescue, he said. “Under pressure, I returned to reality and started to work again.”
With limited staff and equipment, Gaza’s civil defence sometimes calls on volunteers to assist in a rescue operation, like in the Wihda Street massacre in Gaza City last year, where residential buildings belonging to the Abu al-Ouf and al-Qawlaq families were bombed at nearly the same time.
“Calling more people to join us was important as the destruction was massive, and we needed to avoid a high rate of civilian casualties,” Abu Shaqfa said.
It is the ever-present danger of Israeli aggression, and the high price such aggression exacts, that makes the work of first responders in Gaza so demanding and dangerous. Add to this, an Israeli-imposed siege on Gaza prevents necessary equipment from helping the civil defense forces modernize.
Thus, Gaza’s firefighters are unable to secure vital items like fire hoses, firefighter lights or spears under Israel’s so-called dual-use lists of banned products.
The poor resources available to Gaza’s firefighters were briefly noted by Western media last month.
The New York Times reported, for example, that the first two fire trucks which reached the scene of a major fire in Jabaliya refugee camp did not even have a ladder between them. That was despite how the building where the fire occurred had a number of floors.
A total of 21 people were killed in the Jabaliya fire.
Better equipment could allow first responders in Gaza to “save thousands of lives,” Samir al-Khatib, deputy director of Gaza’s civil defense, said.
“We have not been able to keep pace with developments abroad. “
In all, according to al-Khatib, Gaza has between 450 and 500 emergency responders, including firefighters.
First responders are supposed to be protected under the Geneva Conventions. However, according to al-Khatib, 34 have been killed during Israel’s aggressions against Gaza since 2008.
“We have been targeted multiple times even though we always wear our uniforms. Our cars are known to the Israeli side,” said al-Khatib. But, “we cannot trust the Israeli soldiers. We fear the treachery of the occupation forces.”
This 1870s engraving depicts an enslaved woman and young girl being auctioned as property in the United States / credit: Universal History Archive
With the United States’ Independence Day having passed, Toward Freedom is re-printing this analysis by Gerald Horne, which originally appeared in OrganizingUpgrade.com.
The good news is that Comrade Bob Wing’s analysis represents a step forward in terms of the U.S. Left’s understanding of the nation—“republic”—in which it struggles.
The bad news is that the U.S. left has not necessarily kept pace with the U.S. ruling class in terms of similar issues, or even with non-radical African-Americans, for that matter.
Consider the multi-part series on HBO Max (a member in good standing of the much reviled “corporate media”) that premiered recently, i.e. Black filmmaker Raoul Peck’s “Exterminate All the Brutes,” a sweeping analysis and condemnation of settler colonialism (a term curiously absent from ordinary discourse on the left) and white supremacy. His other credits include the superb docu-drama “The Young Karl Marx.”
Consider the 1619 Project of The New York Times, spearheaded by Black journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, which—inter alia—had the audacity to suggest that a settlers’ revolt in 1776 led by slaveholders may have had something to do with maintaining slavery. Revealingly, the assault on this estimable initiative was mounted by self-described “socialists”, liberals and conservatives: in essence, The White Republic.
Consider the book by Black scholar Tyler Stovall (published by an Ivy League press), White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea, which is more advanced ideologically than comparable analyses on the U.S. left.
Consider the response to the concerted effort to deodorize the smelly roots of the vaunted “Founding Fathers”: I speak of the Broadway/Disney extravaganza, “Hamilton,” celebrated by the Cheneys and Obamas alike, not to mention some to their left—but skewered by paramount Black intellectual, Ishmael Reed.
How and why the U.S. left has tailed the ruling class on such a bedrock matter as conceptualizing white supremacy soars far beyond the confines of this brief response. Suffice it to say for now that misconception begins with the origins of the slaveholders’ republic in 1776, a creation myth that Comrade Wing does not challenge explicitly. Those who consider themselves to be sophisticated refer to an “Incomplete Revolution,” as if the founders had in mind “others” not defined as “white” but, perhaps, forgot to include them. This is akin to referring to implanting apartheid in 1948 as an “Incomplete Reform,” as if these founders, perhaps, forgot to include Africans in the bounty that was accorded to poorer Afrikaners. Even the supposedly perceptive term “bourgeois democracy” as a descriptor for 1776 and its fruits is misleading at best since “rights” definitely did not include any not defined as “white” and, thus, this term becomes part of the massive misdirection that now has us on the brink of fascism.
Settler Colonialism and the Construction of Whiteness
First, consider the confluence of settler colonialism and the construction of “whiteness.” When settlers arrived in what is now North Carolina in the 1580s it was a multi-class venture—shopkeepers, smiths, etc.—sponsored by the London elite. This was in the midst of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. Catholic Spain, which came within a whisker of toppling the London monarchy in 1588, imposed religion as a qualifier for settlement. England, the scrappy Protestant underdog, moved toward Pan-Europeanism—or “whiteness”—incorporating Scots and Irish and Welsh in the first instance, those with whom they had been warring for centuries, and then moved toward incorporating others who had been warring: British v. German; German v. Pole; Pole v. Russian; Serb v. Croat—the list is long. All of a sudden when crossing the Atlantic, in a manner that would make Madison Avenue blush, all are rebranded as “white,” which subsumes many of the tensions, ethnic and class among them, in a new monetized and militarized “identity politics” of “whiteness” based on expropriation of the Indigenous and mass enslavement of the Africans.
As the 17th century roots of Maryland suggest, London was willing to sponsor Catholic settlers, while inquisitorial Madrid continued to bar and expel those not deemed to be religiously correct. Thus, from the inception in the early 1500s, Havana contained African conquistadors who professed Catholicism (a sharp divergence from racialized settlements in the “Anglo-sphere”, leaving a legacy which continues to wrongfoot those seeking to comprehend socialist Cuba) and as late as 200 years ago, settler Stephen F. Austin professed a nominal Catholicism in order to engage in his land grab in Mexican Texas.
Of course, Ottoman—and heavily Islamic–Turkey was an igniting factor in this process. Their seizure of what is now Istanbul in 1453 impelled an existential crisis in Western European Christendom: as Columbus headed westward in 1492, on behalf of Catholics he was seeking to circumvent the Ottomans; 1492 also marks the accelerated weakening of Islamic rule in Iberia, followed by many fleeing to North Africa and to Ottoman jurisdiction, along with the Jewish minority.
Tellingly, London had expelled its own Jewish minority circa 1290-1291 but in the contestation with Catholics, this Protestant power embraced this minority—as did Protestant Holland—and the victorious republicans did so too by 1776. The philosophically idealistic and credulous tried to convince the rest of us that this was a result of “Enlightenment,” as opposed to seeking to broaden the base of settler colonialism in order to confront obstreperous Africans and the mighty Indigenous.
Interestingly, in the late 1930s, the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo also embraced a fleeing European Jewish minority and only the naïve would ascribe this decision to “Enlightenment”—as opposed to a crude attempt to “whiten” the population in the ongoing conflict with the bête noire that was neighboring Haiti, whose nationals were simultaneously being massacred along the border.
Speaking of neighbors, it is similarly informative that patriotic U.S. analysts of the left generally refuse to scrutinize the “control group” due north. Canada did not rebel against London and yet now has a health care system that is the envy of the so-called “revolutionary republic”—should not one expect the opposite?
Actually, settlers’ revolts—be they in Southern Rhodesia in 1965 or Algeria in the late 1950s—are generally problematic, especially when driven by white supremacy and/or religious bigotry. To the “credit” of the North American settlers’ revolt, unlike their French counterparts in Algiers, they were not as advanced in seeking to liquidate the monarch himself, as was the case in Paris in April 1961 with Charles de Gaulle in the crosshairs. (For the naïve who continue to guzzle the Kool-Aid and propaganda of “liberal democracy,” on the 50th anniversary of this plot, French military men threatened a coup against President Macron, just as the elite U.S. publication Foreign Affairs reported a disturbing trend of the military bucking civilian rule: see also 6 January 2021 and the recent open letter signed by dozens of retired military brass in the U.S. echoing MAGA talking points and warning ominously against the purported “socialism” of the current regime in Washington.)
Given the troubling roots of this republic, it was inevitable that at a certain point what are described as “cultural” issues—immigration; reproductive and LGBTTQ rights—would leap to the fore as these are perceived as natal matters essential to an apartheid state: maintaining a presumed “white” majority.
Left-Wing White Nationalism
This transition from religion to “race” was occurring in the context of a bumpy transition from feudalism to capitalism. “Bloody Mary,” the English monarch in the mid-16th century, received her moniker as a result of reports of Catholics burning Protestants at the stake. Unsurprisingly, as capitalism attained liftoff as a direct result of the plunder of the Indigenous and the mass enslavement of the Africans, by the end of the 19th century, Africans were being immolated (in enslaved form representing the essence of capitalism)—with either Catholics or Protestants of European descent, often of British origin (at times jointly) lighting the torch.
The attempt to build “class unity” without confronting these underlying tensions often has meant coercing oppressed nationalities—Blacks in the first place—to co-sign a kind of “left wing white nationalism,” as reflected in the lengthy attempt to convert slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson, into a unifying symbol. Black failure to do so leads to our denunciation—in today’s terms as “identitarian” [sic], in previous decades, as “narrow nationalist.” Actually, the class collaboration embodied in “whiteness” was seeking to impose “class collaboration” on the descendants of the enslaved, inducing us to align with enslavers and their descendants. And given that pre-1865 U.S. history—and to a degree the era thereafter—involved deputizing Euro-American settlers as a class to patrol and coerce the Indigenous and the Africans, this too involved an often undetected class collaboration. It also involved often lush material incentives for those settlers who complied and harsh disincentives for those who did not.
In sum, unlike Raoul Peck, the U.S. left parachuted into the 20th century and sought to impose an ersatz “class unity” brutally at odds with historical reality. They were akin to cineastes entering the theatre halfway through the film, while thinking they had a firm grasp of the plot. Indeed, Peck’s work and that of other Blacks represents an attempt to wrest the powerful searchlight of Marxism away from those who have strived to convert it into a feeble flashlight.
When reality does not correspond to the facts on the ground, the U.S. left often responds like the fictional French intellectual who maunders: “I know what you are saying is true in fact, the question is—‘is it true in theory?’” That is, a detailed knowledge of history and contemporary trends is the meat to be placed on the skeleton that is theory—without that meat one is left with a putrefying cadaver.
Thus, when Euro-Americans vote across class lines for faux billionaires, we are instructed that the reason is that the opposition did not meet their exacting progressive standards—hence, they voted for the right. (Once when I was explaining to a prominent left-leaning scribe that the citadel of the elite, the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and the citadel of the Euro-American working and middle classes, Staten Island, are the bastions of the right wing in Gotham, he demurred seeking to point out that the latter borough voted thusly because of liberal failings: and, yes, he had never heard of John Marchi, Staten Island’s decades long proto-fascist GOP boss, re-elected repeatedly.) Of course, this miscomprehension begs the question as to why descendants of the enslaved even in the same borough and nationwide – marinated in the ultimate class struggle of slaves versus slaveholder – vote against the right wing in extraordinarily high numbers.
This misanalysis also neatly elides the instructive 1991 gubernatorial election in Louisiana when well over half of Euro-Americans across class lines voted for a Nazi and Klansman, David Duke, for governor—who would have prevailed but for the staggering blow delivered to his onrushing campaign by the mailed fist that was the Black vote.
Forge Alliances Beyond U.S. Borders
African Americans in particular sliced neatly the Gordian knot of oppression historically by forging alliances beyond the confines of settler colonialism, with ties to the Indigenous (e.g. antebellum Florida) or Haiti (post-1804) or London (1776-1865) or Tokyo (pre-1945) or Moscow (post-1917) or independent Africa and the Caribbean (post-1960).
What does this mean for today? It means rejecting the new Cold War against Russians and Chinese and, instead, forging alliances with both. It means linking demands for reparations nationally with like-minded struggles in the Caribbean and Africa. It means realizing that the uncanny ability of some on the U.S. left to hand rhetorical weapons to the right to bash the oppressed—from “political correctness” to “cancel culture”—is hardly a coincidence or accident but simply another expression of a “cross-class alliance” that has propped up settler colonialism from its inception. (Truth be told, these weapons were honed principally by “white” leftists in internecine conflicts that led—objectively and unsurprisingly—to a dearth of questioning of the legitimacy of settler colonialism.) It also means forcing class initiatives as a solvent against the pestilence that is white supremacy—for example, the PRO law or right to organize unions, now before Congress.
Per Comrade Wing, it also means seeking to deepen our understanding of the fundamentals of U.S. imperialism, white supremacy not least. Congratulations to Comrade Wing for seeking to rescue virtually every sector of the “radical” U.S. left from a swamp of Right Opportunism.
Gerald Horne is author of many books including, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, Jazz and Justice: Racism and the Political Economy of the Music, and Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic.